The automotive body repair industry requires exacting standards to ensure proper color matching of vehicles being repaired there, in an expected procedure to return the damaged vehicle to pre-accident condition and with an invisible paint repair to the rest of the car not being painted. While factory standard colors may be provided to an auto body repair shop, variations of those colors from the factory standard occur often and those formulas and sprayed out samples are offered as additional variations of the standard color for the refinisher to compare against the vehicle to be repaired and evaluate to determine the best possible match. Pre sprayed samples of the original color and the variations offered are compared to the vehicle targeted for repair prior to the refinishing process.
In order to correctly evaluate color samples to a color on a repair vehicle, a pure white light source is required. Currently available white light sources for auto body shops either do not provide as pure of a white light as possible or get so hot during operation that they can only be used for a very limited amount of time and automatically shut down to prevent overheating, sometimes before the body shop technician can properly match colors.
It would be beneficial to provide a white light source for auto body shops to match paint colors that provides as pure white light as possible, the light having a Color Rendition Index that reflects its ability to produce all colors in the 400 to 700 nanometer color wavelength spectrum and operates as sufficiently low temperature that the light does not automatically shut down due to overheating.